You Live Only Once !

Make the best of life's moments...

What really matters at the end of the day isIf you've made the best use of time,

And done everything that you needed to do.
Don't sit just there waiting,

You only live once!

Scientists discover moral compass in the brain which can be controlled by magnets

The moral copass, technically named the right temporo-parietal junction, lies just behind the right ear in the brain

Scientists have discovered a real-life 'moral compass' in the brain that controls how we judge other people's behaviour.

The region, which lies just behind the right ear, becomes more active when we think about other people's misdemeanours or good works.

In an extraordinary experiment, researchers were able to use powerful magnets to disrupt this area of the brain and make people temporarily less moral.

The study highlights how our sense of right and wrong isn't just based on upbringing, religion or philosophy - but by the biology of our brains.

Dr Liane Young, who led the study, said: 'You think of morality as being a really high-level behaviour. To be able to apply a magnetic field to a specific brain region and change people's moral judgements is really astonishing.'

The moral compass lies in a part of the brain called the right temporo-parietal junction. It lies near the surface of the brain, just behind the right ear.

The researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used a non-invasive technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation to disrupt the area of the brain.

The technique generates a magnetic field on a small part of the skull which creates weak electric currents in the brain. These currents interfere with nearby brain cells and prevent them from firing normally.

In the first experiment, 12 volunteers were exposed to the magnetic field for 25 minutes before they were given a series of 'moral maze' style scenarios.

For each of the 192 scenarios, they were asked to make a judgement about the character's actions on a scale of 1 for 'absolutely forbidden' to 7 for 'absolutely permissible'.

In the second experiment, the magnetic field was applied to their heads at the time they were asked to weigh up the behaviour of the characters in the scenario.

In both experiments, the magnetic field made the volunteers less moral.

One scenario described a man who let his girlfriend walk over a bridge he knew was unsafe. The girl survived unharmed.

Under normal conditions, most people rate the man's behaviour as unacceptable. But after getting the magnetic pulse, the volunteers tended to see nothing wrong with his actions - and judged his behaviour purely on whether his girlfriend survived.

Another scenario described two girls visiting a chemical plant where one girl asks her friend to put sugar in her coffee.

The friend uses powder from a jar marked 'toxic' - but as the powder turns out to be sugar, the girls if unharmed.

Volunteers with a disrupted moral compass tended to rate the girl's behaviour as permissible because her friend was not injured - even though she was aware the powder came from a jar labelled toxic.

Throughout the experiment, irresponsible or deliberate actions that might have resulted in harm were seen as morally acceptable if the story had a 'happy ending', they reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It's not the first time that scientists have found parts of the brain that specialise in ethics and morality. Last year American scientists claimed to have found a "god spot" - a region of the brain that controls religious belief.
By David Derbyshire
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1262074/Scientists-discover-moral-compass-brain-controlled-magnets.html#ixzz0jeWVaP5s

Universe Has Billions More Stars Than Thought : Discovery News

Universe Has Billions More Stars Than Thought : Discovery News

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MacBook 3D ! (Glasses Included)

2009 was the year of EVERYTHING IS TOUCHSCREEN but times-a-changing. I’m just gonna go ahead and make a prediction for 2010. We’re going to see a bag load of concepts with 3D-enabled technologies. Take a look at this MacBook 3D and get used to some of the features. It’s like any other MacBook except there are stereoscopic iSight cameras, a touchscreen trackpad (soooo 2009), and a hingeless spine design.

All kidding aside, I am a bit intrigued. 3D imaging has Hollywood scrambling to join the bandwagon so it’s obvious technology leaders will soon provide consumers with some of the same features. Apple’s iSight camera is good so slapping two on there to provide simulated depth is totally feasible. Just imagine chat rouletting in 3D! I’m not sure about the hingeless design though; couldn’t tell it it’s flexible or a segmented joint. The jury is still out on touchscreen trackpads. We saw tons of those concepts all through 2008-2009 and no manufacture seems to have bitten. Is it just too novel, too expensive, and power draining to implement?
Designer: Tai Chiem

8 Foods that Fight Stress

Eat It to Beat It !
We all know that tension can wreak havoc on our eating patterns. But the right (healthy!) foods can often help tame mindless munching and cravings and, better yet, actually lower overall anxiety and its symptoms. Eight of our favorites:
Dark Chocolate
High in flavonoids, which are lauded for their relaxing properties (chamomile tea is another great source), chocolate also contains phenethylamine, a chemical that enhances your mood. The darker the chocolate, the more healthy substances you're getting in your diet, so look for bars that are 70 percent cacao or higher.
Skim Milk
Turns out that a glass of warm milk really is calming. One study found that women who drank four or more servings of lowfat or skim milk every day were about half as likely to experience stress-related PMS symptoms than those who drank less than one serving a week.
Oatmeal
Carbs help you produce serotonin, a calming hormone that helps fight anxiety's negative effects-which is probably why many of us crave them when we're stressed. Go with the craving and choose healthy sources. Oatmeal is high in fiber, which means that your body will absorb it slowly. In one fell swoop, you'll prolong the serotonin boost, keeping yourself feeling full for longer (and on less) and making sure your blood sugar's in check.
Salmon
Research shows that omega-3 fatty acids-abundant in fish like salmon-can help reverse stress symptoms by boosting serotonin levels, and that an omega-3-rich diet can also help suppress the production of the anxiety hormones cortisol and adrenaline.
Walnuts
They've been shown to help lower blood pressure, which is critical for those whose hearts are already working overtime thanks to high adrenaline levels. In fact, research so strongly backs their health benefits that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration goes so far as to recommend 1 1/2 oz per day.
Sunflower Seeds
A good source of folate, which helps your body produce a pleasure-inducing brain chemical called dopamine.
Spinach
Studies show that magnesium, which you'll find in leafy greens like spinach, improves your body's response to stress.
Blueberries
Their antioxidants counteract the effects of stress hormones like cortisol on your body.

How to clean your keyboard

It’s important to remember to show your keyboard some love every now and then both for the sake of good hygiene and to ensure it functions properly. Those keys take quite a beating everyday, and all the little crevices are excellent at trapping things like dust and hair, and if you ever eat near your computer, it’s easy to wind up with sticky surfaces and crumbs buried between the cracks. Ew, right? Here, step-by-step instructions to get your keyboard in tip top shape.
Shut down your PC, and unplug the mouse, discs or CDs, USB drives or anything else that’s protruding from your machine. Carefully, turn the keyboard (or your entire laptop, as the case may be) upside down and give it a gentle shake to release any dusty build-up that might be lurking between the keys.
Use a can of compressed air (available at just about any electronics store) to blow off residual debris around and under all the nooks and crannies. Alternatively, the hose of a vacuum cleaner works too.
Put a couple drops of isopropyl alcohol on a Q-tip and run it around the edges of your keys to get them squeaky clean. The cotton swab should be only slightly damp—not wet—dripping liquid into your keyboard is (obviously) a bad thing!
Lastly, give the whole thing a once over with a dry, lint-free cloth, and let it air dry for a few minutes before using it (never turn on your machine until you’re positive the keys are completely dry). And between in-depth cleanings, one of my favorite tricks is to use the sticky part of a Post-It note to run between rows of keys to pick up dust.

by Emily Hsieh, Shine staff,

Running Out Of USB Ports?

One of the limitations on notebooks is the lack of USB ports in proportion to the number of devices we would like to hook up.

An easy remedy these days is the USB Hub, but YD won’t be YD if we showcased run-of-the-mill solutions!

So here’s the Infinite USB – an alternative plug on devices that kinda acts like a tag team.

The design speaks for itself, so no point elaborating, however what we can do is talk about its effectiveness and limitations.

For starters, we may not be able to tag too many devices one behind the other.

Max 3 or 4 before the tag starts to look awkward, but the color coding on plugs will make it easy to identify which plug belongs to which device.
Designer: Gonglue Jiang

Single Gear Wonder

The AO stands out for a simple and stylish bike that handles urban life with ease and comfort.

It incorporates a ‘single gear’ system using a rubber belt for maximum control and maneuverability.

Built in safety features like a dynamo to power the front and rear lights is one of its highlights. The saddle and wheel feature a special suspension system to ensure a smooth ride in your city.

A new-age approach to bike redesigning!
Designer: Omer Sagiv

Device to convert seawater offers hope to parched lands

PARIS (AFP) – Scientists said on Sunday they had made a nanotech device to strip salt from seawater, paving the way to small-scale or even battery-powered desalination for drought-hit regions and disaster zones.
The tiny prototype is reported on the eve of the UN's World Water Day, which aims to highlight the worsening problems of access to clean water.
Conventional desalination works by forcing water through a membrane to remove molecules of salt.
But this process is an energy-gobbler and the membrane is prone to clogging, which means that de-sal plants are inevitably big, expensive, fixed pieces of kit.
The new gadget has been given a proof-of-principle test by Jongyoon Han and colleagues of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
It works through so-called ion concentration polarisation, which occurs when a current of charged ions is passed through an ion-selective membrane.
The idea is to create a force that moves charged ions and particles in the water away from the membrane.
When the water passes through the system, salt ions -- as well as cells, viruses and micro-organisms -- get pushed to the side. This saltier water is then drawn off, leaving only de-salted water to pass through the main microchannel.
The tiny device had a recovery rate of 50 percent, meaning that half of the water used at the start was desalinated. Ninety-nine percent of the salt in this water was removed.
Energy efficiency was similar to or better than state-of-the-art large-scale desalination plants.
"Rather than competing with larger desalination plants, the methods could be used to make small- or medium-scale systems, with the possibility of battery-powered operation," their paper, published by the journal Nature Nanotechnology, suggests.
In an email to AFP, Han said the experiment entailed a tiny microfluidic chip, just a few millimetres (fraction of an inch) square, that desalted just 10 microlitres per minute.
"The idea toward the real-world application is that we would make many of these devices, thousands or tens of thousands of them, on a plate, and operate them in parallel, in the same way semiconductor manufacturers are building many small electronic chips on a single large wafer," explained Han.
"That would bring the flow rate up to around 100 millilitres (three fluid ounces) per minute level, which is comparable to typical household water purifiers and therefore useful in many applications."
A patent has been filed for the device. However, it may be a matter of years before the invention reaches a commercial scale.
At such early days, the costs of the future system are unknown.
But, said Han, overheads may be significantly reduced because gravity can be used to put the water through the device, as opposed to forced it through by pumps, and there is less of a problem of membrane fouling.
The theme of Monday's World Water Day is "Clean Water for a Healthy World," touching on the growing problem of water contamination in countries grappling with water stress and fast-rising populations.

/by Richard Ingham

The last picture will tell you everything !

7 Ways to Raise Your Risk of Stroke

Stroke is the number three killer in the United States, affecting almost 800,000 people each year, according to the National Stroke Association. These "brain attacks" occur when blood flow to the brain is interrupted (an ischemic stroke) or when a blood vessel in the brain leaks or bursts (a hemorrhagic stroke). For 144,000 people each year, the result is death. Hundreds of thousands of others are left with long-term disabilities.
Genetics, age and race play a role in stroke, as do many other factors, both controllable and uncontrollable. Recent research has teased out more and more of these risk factors, from how you eat to where you live.
Here's what scientists are finding are top risks for a stroke:
7. High-fat diet
The same foods associated with heart attacks - red meat, anything fried - can also raise your risk of a brain attack. At the American Stroke Association's (ASA) International Stroke Conference in February, researchers from the University of North Carolina presented findings that post-menopausal women who consumed high-fat diets had 40 percent more incidences of ischemic stroke than low-fat eaters. Trans fats, found in processed foods like pastries and crackers, seem particularly nasty: The group of women who consumed seven grams of trans fat each day had 30 percent more stroke incidents than those who ate one gram.
So what to eat instead? Multiple studies suggest that a Mediterranean-inspired diet can lower stroke risk. That means lots of vegetables, whole grains, fish, olive oil, nuts and seeds, and very little red meat and sweets.
6. Being single
If you're a man who'd like to cut his chances of a fatal stroke, get hitched. A Tel Aviv University study of more than 10,000 Israeli men found that those who were married at midlife were 64 percent less likely to die of a stroke during the next 34 years than single men. The data was adjusted for other stroke risk factors like socioeconomic status, blood pressure and smoking.
But there's a catch: The marriage has to be a happy one. Men who reported dissatisfying marriages were just as likely as single men to die of a stroke, the researchers reported at the ASA's International Stroke Conference.
5. Being unhappy
Happiness is music to your cardiovascular system. Researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston reported in 2001 that among older individuals, positive moods and attitudes protected against strokes. Even incremental increases in happiness helped: For every step up on the researchers' happiness scale, male participants' stroke risk dropped 41 percent. Women's risk dropped 18 percent per happiness unit.
Even if you're not happy, it might pay to act like you are. The researchers speculate that happy people are more likely to get medical care, exercise and stay healthy, all protective factors against stroke.
4. Being obese
More weight means a higher risk of stroke, according to researchers from the University of Minnesota. In a study presented at the International Stroke Conference last month, researchers followed more than 13,000 Americans for 19 years and found that the risk of stroke in people with the highest body mass index (BMI) was 1.43 to 2.12 times higher than in those with the lowest body mass index. (BMI is calculated with a person's height and weight and is considered an indicator of body fatness.)
The reason for the correlation is that some stroke risk factors are worsened by obesity, study co-author Hiroshi Yatsuya said in a statement. The biggest culprits, according to the data are high blood pressure and diabetes.
3. Smoking
Lighting up nearly doubles your risk of stroke, according to the American Heart Association (AHA). Fortunately, quitting can drop that risk back down, even for heavy smokers. One 1988 study found that former smokers had the same rate of stroke as nonsmokers five years after snuffing their last cigarette.
2. Being born in the wrong demographic (for a stroke)
Unfortunately, not all risk factors are under your control. Blacks have twice the incidence of strokes as whites, according to the AHA. Not only that, but the death rate from stroke is significantly higher for blacks than the overall stroke death rate. Part of the disparity may be explained by higher-than-average rates of diabetes and high blood pressure among blacks.
Being female can also put you at a disadvantage when it comes to stroke. In a study presented at ASA's International Stroke Conference, University of Southern California researchers reported that women aged 35 to 64 are almost three times as likely to have a stroke as men of the same age. The reason may be that women in midlife carry more abdominal fat than men, a risk factor for stroke, said the researchers.
1. Being a born-and-bred Southerner
The swath of stroke-prone states across the Southeastern United States - generally including North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama - have long been known as the "Stroke Belt." But recent research suggests that just being born and spending your childhood in one of these states raises your risk for stroke, even if you move away later.
In a study published in the journal Neurology in 2009, Harvard public health professor Maria Glymour and her colleagues reported that among blacks, being born in the Stroke Belt increased the risk of stroke by 22 percent. For whites, the number was 30 percent. Part of the reason may be due to risk factors like poor diet, smoking and obesity, which may start earlier in southern states, Glymour told LiveScience.
"By the time that they're middle-aged and we're enrolling them in our studies, it looks like lots of people have those risk factors," she said. "But maybe people in the South have been carrying them for longer."
Stephanie Pappase /LiveScience.com

More Americans say global warming exaggerated: poll

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A growing number of Americans, nearly half the country, think global warming worries are exaggerated and more people doubt that scientific warnings of severe environmental fallout will ever occur, according to a new Gallup poll.
The new doubts come as President Barack Obama pressures Congress to produce legislation significantly cutting smokestack emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases blamed for climate change problems.
Gallup's survey was released on the same day that the Obama administration unveiled in Texas a public-private report underscoring threats to birds as climate change alters their habitat and food supply, pushing many species to extinction.
With congressional elections in November, many lawmakers are hesitant to take on a controversial energy and environment bill, especially if voter interest is waning.
Around the world, concerns about climate change have dipped as economic worries took higher priority, according to a Nielson/Oxford University survey in December, which found the highest concern was in Latin America and Asia-Pacific countries like the Philippines, where typhoons are a big threat.
While U.S. worries about climate change fell significantly in the Nielson poll, they did not come close to some eastern European countries such as Estonia, which ranked bottom.
In response to escalating attacks from global warming skeptics, the Union of Concerned Scientists on Thursday released a letter they said was signed by more than 2,000 climate scientists and economists, including some Nobel prize winners, urging the U.S. Senate to pass a climate change bill.
"The strength of the science on climate change compels us to warn the nation about the growing risk of irreversible consequences ... as temperatures rise further, the scope and severity of global warming impacts will continue to accelerate," they wrote.
The Gallup poll, conducted March 4-7, indicates a reversal in public sentiment on an issue that not only involves the environment, but also economic and national security concerns.
Forty-eight percent of Americans now believe that the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated, up from 41 percent last year and 31 percent in 1997, when Gallup first asked the question.
The survey follows reports that some of the scientific details of findings that went into international global warming reports were either flawed or exaggerated.
Supporters of a global effort to keep the Earth's temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels agree that scientists need to be more fastidious in their research, but there is overwhelming evidence that a warming planet will lead to ice melting, flooding, drought, refugees and the spread of disease.
The United States has made a non-binding pledge to seek a 17 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2020, from 2005 levels, mostly by switching to alternative energy, such as wind and solar power. But without legislation from Congress, that goal is unlikely to be met.
The Gallup poll of slightly more than 1,014 adults has a sampling error margin of plus or minus 4 percent.
A majority still believes global warming is real but that percentage is falling, with the average American now less convinced than at any time since 1997.
Thirty-five percent said in the latest poll that the effects of global warming either will never happen (19 percent) or will not happen in their lifetimes (16 percent).
/By Richard Cowan

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Researchers back cancer-fighting properties of papaya

MIAMI (AFP) – Researchers said Tuesday that papaya leaf extract and its tea have dramatic cancer-fighting properties against a broad range of tumors, backing a belief held in a number of folk traditions.
University of Florida researcher Nam Dang and colleagues in Japan, in a report published in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, documented papaya's anticancer effect against tumors of the cervix, breast, liver, lung and pancreas.
The researchers used an extract made from dried papaya leaves, and the effects were stronger when cells received larger doses of papaya leaf tea.
Dang and the other scientists showed that papaya leaf extract boosts the production of key signaling molecules called Th1-type cytokines, which help regulate the immune system.
This could lead to therapeutic treatments that use the immune system to fight cancers, they said in the February issue of the journal and released Tuesday by the university.
Papaya has been used as a folk remedy for a variety of ailments in many parts of the world, especially Asia.
Deng said the results are consistent with reports from indigenous populations in Australia and his native Vietnam.
The researchers said papaya extract did not have any toxic effects on normal cells, avoiding a common side effect of many cancer treatments.
Researchers exposed 10 different types of cancer cell cultures to four strengths of papaya leaf extract and measured the effect after 24 hours. Papaya slowed the growth of tumors in all the cultures.
Dang and a colleague have applied to patent the process to distill the papaya extract through the University of Tokyo.

Ice Once Covered the Equator !

Sea ice may have covered the Earth's surface all the way to the equator hundreds of millions of years ago, a new study finds, adding more evidence to the theory that a "snowball Earth" once existed.
The finding, detailed in the March 5 issue of the journal Science, also has implications for the survival and evolution of life on Earth through this bitter ice age.
Geologists found evidence that tropical areas were once covered by glaciers by examining ancient tropical rocks that are now found in remote northwestern Canada. These rocks have moved because the Earth's surface, and the rocks on it, are in constant motion, pushed around by the roiling currents of the planet's interior, a process called plate tectonics).
The rocks from Canada's Yukon Territory showed glacial deposits and other signs of glaciation, such as striated clasts, ice-rafted debris, and deformation of soft sediments.
The scientists were able to determine, based on the magnetism and composition of these rocks, that 716.5 million years ago the rocks were located at sea-level in the tropics, at about 10 degrees latitude. The period of glaciations that occurred then is called Sturtian glaciation, one of the two greatest ice ages known to have taken place on Earth.
"This is the first time that the Sturtian glaciation has been shown to have occurred at tropical latitudes, providing direct evidence that this particular glaciation was a 'snowball Earth' event," said lead author of the study Francis Macdonald, a geologist at Harvard University.
"Our data also suggest that the Sturtian glaciation lasted a minimum of five million years," Macdonald added.
One intriguing question suggested by the finding is how life forms - particularly those more complex than microbes - survived throughout this harsh climate. Their survival suggests that sunlight and surface water remained available somewhere on Earth's surface, perhaps in patches of open water that formed in the sea ice and provided a refuge for life.
"The fossil record suggests that all of the major eukaryotic groups, with the possible exception of animals, existed before the Sturtian glaciation," Macdonald said. "The questions that arise from this are: If a snowball Earth existed, how did these eukaryotes survive? Did the Sturtian snowball Earth stimulate evolution and the origin of animals?" (Eukaryotes have a true nucleus and are more complex than so-called prokaryotes.)
"From an evolutionary perspective," he added, "it's not always a bad thing for life on Earth to face severe stress."
Scientists don't know exactly what caused this glaciation or what ended it, but Macdonald says its age of 716.5 million years closely matches the age of a large igneous province -- made up of rocks formed by magma that has cooled -- stretching more than 932 miles (1,500 kilometers) from Alaska to Ellesmere Island in far northeastern Canada.
This coincidence could mean the glaciation was either precipitated or terminated by volcanic activity.
The work was supported by the National Science Foundation and the Polar Continental Shelf Project.

/LiveScience.com

Mozart Of Lights !

So you can’t be a conductor of any musical symphony nor do you have any creativity in painting and art.

Tough luck, but what if I gave you this magical wand, that allowed you to transform your ceiling into a magical landscape of color LEDs, that brighten up and dim at the flick of your wrist, wouldn’t you be the Mozart of lights?

Draw The Lights makes you a capable light conductor!

What I mean is that clusters of LEDs take command from this “light brush” in your hand, and sparkle to create mesmerizing ambient settings.

If creativity gets the better of you, how about creating artwork with the lights?

Fancy!
Designer: Seo Dong-Hun

Wind Up With Glee

Putting it straight enough for you, Wind Up Socket has a timer to it, once you set the duration and time’s up, the electricity supply to that socket gets cut off.

For grownups who don’t have many restrictions and can self regulate, this one may seem more cumbersome than anything else.

But for moms with teens who don’t comprehend “half hour of TV / Videogames time”; this is booty!

I’d only be careful of placing the cords of various gadgets carefully, otherwise its set!
Designers: Dongwon Joo & Jieun Choi

Work key to long life for 102-year-old judge

Judge Brown’s long career may be one reason he has exceeded the average life expectancy by more than two decades, according to a report by Harvard Medical School that studied people who lived to 100 or more.
Judge Wesley Brown began working at about age 10, after his father fell ill and he had to help support his family. That was about 1917, and the federal judge in Wichita said that beginning work at a young age is one reason he's still showing up to the courthouse every day at 102.
"I've worked all my life," Brown said recently in an interview. "I wouldn't know what else to do."
His long career could be one of the reasons Brown has exceeded the average life expectancy by more than two decades.
A report by the Harvard Medical School said the number of people living to 100 and beyond doubled in the past two decades. Brown is one of about 70,000 Americans 100 or more years old.
Brown has been an avid golfer and until recently took the stairs every day to his fourth-floor office — the top floor at the federal courthouse.
"People who live to 100 and beyond exercise their brains, too, by reading, painting, and playing musical instruments," said the Harvard paper, "Living to 100: What's the Secret." "Some continue to work, an indication that our love affair with retirement may be a mixed blessing."
Brown's job as a judge certainly challenges his intellect, dealing with complicated issues of law over time.
Appointed by John F. Kennedy in 1962, Brown served as a federal judge through the civil rights era and 10 presidents. Brown was born in 1907 — a couple of months after the first musical broadcast on radio. The technology achievement that year: The first helicopter lifted off — four years after the Wright Brothers took the first flight.
He's seen the advent of radio, television and the Internet.
"It's progressed like the multiplication tables," Brown said of technology. "If you start doubling something, you get up to pretty high numbers pretty fast. And communication has done that."
As a judge, Brown finds it fascinating that people still argue about privacy issues with the Internet. He remembers when no one had privacy on the telephone.
People cranked the ringer on the wall in Brown's youth, and every phone in town would ring.
"You'd call a central operator, in the early days, and she knew about what everybody was doing all over the community," Brown said.
Today, Brown stays plugged in with his computer, his cell phone, and the realization that privacy comes and goes with every new innovation.
"I don't know what secrets we can have these days," Brown said. "And I've sort of decided to live my life on the basis of there's no secrets."
Except maybe the secret of living a healthy life for more than a century.

By RON SYLVESTER
/The Wichita Eagle

Powerful Chile Quake 'Shifted Earth's Axis'

The powerful earthquake that killed hundreds of people in Chile on Saturday probably shifted the Earth's axis and made days slightly shorter, a Nasa scientist has said.
Richard Gross, a research scientist at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, calculated how much the axis may have changed in position following the the disaster.
More than 700 people died and two million are estimated to have been affected by the 8.8-magnitude tremor and subsequent tsunamis.
The quake, the most powerful to hit the nation in 50 years, sent shockwaves out from the epicentre 70 miles from Chile's second city, Concepcion.
Buildings and roads collapsed and 500,000 homes have been left severely damaged.
Six aid workers died when a plane carrying them to Concepcion crashed.
The team was on its way to help organise accommodation for those left homeless by the disaster.
Soldiers were sent to patrol Concepcion's streets after mobs set fire to shops and started looting them, hindering attempts to rescue survivors.
If the planet's axis did shift by 8cm during the quake, days would have shortened by 1.26 microseconds, Mr Gross calculated.
A microsecond is one-millionth of a second.
Earth days are 24 hours long because that is the amount of time it takes the planet to make one full rotation on its axis, so shifting the axis would affect rotation.
The quake shifted the Earth's axis by even more than the 9.1-magnitude tremor off Indonesia that started the deadly tsunami in Asia in 2004, according to Mr Gross.
This was partly because the fault line responsible for the quake in Chile "dips into Earth at a slightly steeper angle than does the fault responsible for the 2004 Sumatran earthquake", he said.
The different angle made Saturday's tremor more effective at moving Earth's mass vertically and shifting the planet's axis, Mr Gross continued.
The 2004 quake in Asia, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, caused the Earth to move by around 7cm.
It chopped an estimated 6.8 microseconds off the length of a day, Nasa said.

\Sky News 2010

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